Crysis 2 was 7 GB without DX11 pack, I'll take their words on compression.

As realistic as graphic goes, BF3 is still classified as a 'tactical arcade shooter'. You have to sacrifice something to achieve more fluid gameplay. Now imagine BF3 without breathtaking graphic to back it up, I'm sure it wouldnt receive as many praises. And what if there was a TES game utilize brilliant lightning technique used in Bf3? =)

TF2 went another direction, theres really no comparison here.

Im pretty sure its cause of the low-res textures.

I want higher-res textures, I don't care if it takes 100GB

Oh, yeah... compression... because gamesas is the only company that compresses assets... yeah... that's the ticket!
Mass Effect 1 and 2? No, assets not compressed at all...

How is this thread still going?

It's still missing the point - graphics have nothing to do with making a good game. The game already suffers enough for the graphics it has. It is the gameplay mechanics that make a game great, and the more time and money spent on graphics, the less is spent on making the game actually more unique and enjoyable.

I kind of hope TES VI is released for the same generation of consoles now, just so that all the changes have to be done on the actual gameplay mechanics, and not on frivolous graphics.

I remember reading an interview with one or other of the dev team saying that they had made a breakthrough with compression and were able to compress files smaller than they had been able to do previously. And it was a sort of, if we can compress it more, why shouldn't we do it? I mean lots of console games have multiple discs and better texture resolutions so that is obviously not a reason for anything they did. I don't know why people think it's a "console" idea to get the game to fit on one disc instead of having like 4 discs.

Vanilla Morrowind was about 500mb or something wasn't it? Don't see anyone complaining about that.

All that's clear to me, is that Oblivion didn't have optimal compression.

I'll defend Skyrim any day inside or outside of a court of law, but on these forums, lets be honest with ourselves. They half-[censored] the [censored] out of it and there's nothing we can do about it.

Yes, there are hundreds of awesome aspects which warrant GOTY, but [censored] if they're going to claim "intellectual property" all over the place, what with their DRM face[censored], then they better [censored] well make [censored] sure it's [censored] intellectual.

In a years time my Skyrim folder will be over 20 gigs thanks to mods.

Tell that to the girl you proposed to when you get her a minicule diamond and see how far it gets you

This.

I actually wished they would have delayed the game a month later for PC and released it on Consoles on 11.11.11 and PC the 12.12.11 or something. So they could do what Batman:Arkham City did. Utilize DX11 features etc.

Oh looool total pwned

Well, I don't know what they did to make compression so small but I can say this, Skyrim is one of the biggest open world maps for any single player game I have played since Daggerfall. It took me 45 minutes to go from one end to the other (not on horseback mind you) and I was also sneaking and exploring stuff along the way, but damn its big. Just to put in perspective, II can walk from the southern part of Cyrodil in Oblivion and make it to Anvil in about 10-15 minutes depending on if I have to fight anything along the way.

A lot of the textures that look 3d in Skyrim are actually 2d if you really stop and look. still, it's amazing how 3d they look.

And as for game size, this isn't a [censored], it's a damned video game.

It makes no sense to complain about disk space usage being "too low." The ideal game would consume no disk space (not possible of course.)

If you feel the game world is too small, or there's not enough content, complain about that (but good luck defending that position....)

Or if you feel the graphics could've been higher resolution, then complain about that. Then enjoy all the company who feels the same, and all the mods that are/will supply higher rez textures in the future. Your Skyrim folder will be much bigger by the time you're done installing all of those.

Ultra compression ftw

No not really. You don't really gain anything by making a game extra small.
But the more space you have available to create a game the more could be spend on better textures, better audio quality more content and so on while a smaller size is just a limitation without any benefits.

I agree and the funny thing is it doesn't even fill the 1 DVD on the 360. Only about half the size of a normal DVD...

I sorry to bring down the sky on you mate but the pinnacle size of Mass Effect including its DLC's and patches is just over 8gb.

How do I know, I keep the files that I download so I don't have to download it again. That was not through steam. It was through Bigpond Game Arena.

True, I think most people were expecting something bigger though. Especially when you hear numbers like 150 handcrafted dungeons, 300 in game books, 6-7x as many quests as Fallout 3 (There is definetly more than that), game world same size as Oblivion, better textures, 10x more voice actors etc

I know compression techniques are better but still for all that it seems a bit small, those boys at Bethesda are pretty clever to pack such a large punch into such a small space......... maybe that's why the PC version doesn't work properly

Its puzzling to me in many ways because while the disk space required is low, the PC system requirements for skyrim are much higher than some of the 12 or 15 gig games I have bought.

Overall, I think Skyrim was optimized very well and if you noticed, there are no into or opening movie sequences included with the game, no cutscenes either. This alone probably saved them atleast a couple gig on game size.

Point is, the dungeons don't take up much space. Probably 1MB each max. It's just a bunch of coordinates for the items in them. The same goes for books. They are a few KB each.

What takes up 95% of modern games is two things. Sound and textures. They claim to have used a new compression for sound which would partially explain why the game is smaller. But everyone who played it can see that the textures are pretty low res compared to other games. That's where they saved most space, in my opinion.

I personally would have preferred higher resolution textures and a bigger game. But they did a decent job of making it look good with such low res textures, honestly.

faction questlines are about 5 minutes long. There are a lot of things in the game which feel like they were explored in a really shallow way, but could've been expanded upon a lot more. I love this game, but I sometimes feel like it could've used a lot more dev time. I feel like a lot of things were concluded long before they should've been.

The PSX game Resident Evil 2 spanned two CDs, and those CDs had a storage capacity of something like 650 or 700 MB (clearly the game exceeded that 650 or 700 MB limit, but probably didn't completely fill both discs), so a game that was maybe something like a gigabyte (disregarding redundant information required on both discs) was later compressed to fit onto a 64 MB (64 megabytes, typically presented as 512-megabits) cartridge. I have an old copy of Paint Shop Pro on my PC (my PC is from early 2005) and when I go to save a JPEG I can choose the compression ratio, and a little bit of compression can dramatically slash file size with little to no obvious visual sacrifices (I could present you an uncompressed, 1% compressed, and 15% compressed versions of the same photo and you would have trouble seeing the difference visually but the file sizes would be dramatically different).